Antonio Zichichi.
Fifty years between watches and leather. First with the loupe, then with the cutting knife.
Where he learned to look
At Piaget, in 1974, the ultra-thin calibres: two-millimetre movements where a tenth too much stops everything. One learns to look at a piece for minutes before touching it. It is the same thing he does today with a case: before cutting, understand where the leather must give and where it must not.
In 1984 the first shop, in Milan, vintage watches. There a Patek from the 1950s, dial and movement perfect, fitted on an ordinary strap. The watch seemed switched off. It lacked nothing: it lacked the right companion. From that day, the strap, for him, is not an accessory: it is the half that decides how the other is read.
What he learned in America
Twenty-five years in the United States, selling Italian watchmaking to collectors who knew how to look and asked for things no catalogue had: the leather in that colour, the length for that wrist, the strap for that grandfather's watch with the crooked lugs. He made the straps himself, one at a time. Without a leather goods school: watching, getting it wrong, starting again.
What he does in the atelier
He chooses the leathers, in hand, one at a time, from leading Tuscan and French tanneries: the same leather can be right for one strap and wrong for the next, it depends on the thickness, the case, the wrist. He decides with you the taper, the stitching, the edge, the buckle. Every piece that leaves Via XX Settembre has passed over his workbench.
He does not make rubber or caoutchouc: they require moulds, it is not his work. He does not make straps for watches that do not carry them. He says no when it is no.
The atelier that comes to you
The video call was born with the atelier, for those who cannot be in Milan. Since then, commissions from Europe, from America, from Asia, from Africa. The same ritual, at a distance: the leathers shown one by one in natural light, the measurement from the archive or from the photo, the watch that never travels.
A case: a Patek Philippe Cubitus just presented, integrated bracelet, no strap in the world. Once the right adapter was found, the strap was born upon it.
After delivery
For eighteen months the strap remains entrusted to the atelier: the lining marked by sweat is replaced, the stitching is redone, the piece returns to a decorous state. Damage from improper use is excluded.